Building A Stronger Legal Brief
If written effectively, a brief can put a judge on your side of an issue before you ever step foot in a courtroom.
The Importance of Briefs
When I was brand new to the legal field, I worked for an attorney who had a little cartoon he kept on his desk. It said, “thank goodness justice is blind, since so much legal work is done in briefs.” Briefing, he explained to me, was the single most important skill an attorney needed to master in order to effectively represent his client. Effective briefing includes identifying the issues in a case, citing to proper authority, and crafting a legal argument. If written effectively, a brief can put a judge on your side of an issue before you ever step foot in a courtroom. On the other hand, there is no quicker way to turn a judge against you than to misrepresent the state of the law in your brief.
As a young associate, still wet behind the ears, I knew that the quality of my legal brief was important, but I didn’t have very many supporting resources at my disposal. Now, Westlaw has created a whole suite of tools you can use to make sure that your briefs are laser sharp.
Rely on Westlaw to provide the tools you need to build a winning brief
- As a new attorney, the scariest thing for me was working on a new project without having an example to work from and compare to or a legal briefing template to follow. Thankfully, Westlaw maintains the world’s largest online brief bank for litigators, ensuring that young practitioners will always have a good starting point.
- And there’s KeyCite which helps lawyers make sure a case is good law before the attorney cites it. This tool uses icons at the top of cases which are easy to understand and impossible to miss. KeyCite also goes a step further, providing analysis of the reasons an attorney might need to think twice before citing to a case in a brief.
Read the full article for the full list of tools to build a stronger legal brief.
BONUS: Check out these related articles for more insights from the experts:
- How to Prepare to Write a Legal Brief
- How to Write a Legal Brief
- Don’t Reinvent the Wheel with Your Legal Research
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Nick Borger is a National Client Representative with Thomson Reuters. He regularly works with attorneys at many of the largest and most prestigious law firms in the country. Nick leverages his years of experience in practice to assist customers in finding the most efficient ways to conduct their research. Prior to joining the team, Nick was in private practice for 5 years, focusing mostly on commercial litigation.
